Join devRant
Do all the things like
++ or -- rants, post your own rants, comment on others' rants and build your customized dev avatar
Sign Up
Pipeless API
From the creators of devRant, Pipeless lets you power real-time personalized recommendations and activity feeds using a simple API
Learn More
Search - "i’m finally doing it!!!"
-
5 Types Of Programmers
1.The duct tape programmer
The code may not be pretty, but damnit, it works!
This guy is the foundation of your company. When something goes wrong he will fix it fast and in a way that won’t break again. Of course he doesn’t care about how it looks, ease of use, or any of those other trivial concerns, but he will make it happen, without a bunch of talk or time-wasting nonsense. The best way to use this person is to point at a problem and walk away.
2.The OCD perfectionist programmer
You want to do what to my code?
This guy doesn’t care about your deadlines or budgets, those are insignificant when compared to the art form that is programming. When you do finally receive the finished product you will have no option but submit to the stunning glory and radiant beauty of perfectly formatted, no, perfectly beautiful code, that is so efficient that anything you would want to do to it would do nothing but defame a masterpiece. He is the only one qualified to work on his code.
3.The anti-programming programmer
I’m a programmer, damnit. I don’t write code.
His world has one simple truth; writing code is bad. If you have to write something then you’re doing it wrong. Someone else has already done the work so just use their code. He will tell you how much faster this development practice is, even though he takes as long or longer than the other programmers. But when you get the project it will only be 20 lines of actual code and will be very easy to read. It may not be very fast, efficient, or forward-compatible, but it will be done with the least effort required.
4.The half-assed programmer
What do you want? It works doesn’t it?
The guy who couldn’t care less about quality, that’s someone elses job. He accomplishes the tasks that he’s asked to do, quickly. You may not like his work, the other programmers hate it, but management and the clients love it. As much pain as he will cause you in the future, he is single-handedly keeping your deadlines so you can’t scoff at it (no matter how much you want to).
5.The theoretical programmer
Well, that’s a possibility, but in practice this might be a better alternative.
This guy is more interested the options than what should be done. He will spend 80% of his time staring blankly at his computer thinking up ways to accomplish a task, 15% of his time complaining about unreasonable deadlines, 4% of his time refining the options, and 1% of his time writing code. When you receive the final work it will always be accompanied by the phrase “if I had more time I could have done this the right way”.
What type of programmer are you?
Source: www.stevebenner.com16 -
I’m so mad I’m fighting back anger tears. This is a long rant and I apologize but I’m so freaking mad.
So a few weeks ago I was asked by my lead staff person to do a data analysis project for the director of our dept. It was a pretty big project, spanning thousands of users. I was excited because I love this sort of thing and I really don’t have anything else to do. Well I don’t have access to the dataset, so I had to get it from my lead and he said he’d do it when he had a chance. Three days later he hadn’t given it to me yet. I approach him and he follows me to my desk, gives me his login and password to login to the secure freaking database, then has me clone it and put it on my computer.
So, I start working on it. It took me about six hours to clean the database, 2 to set up the parameters and plan of attack, and two or three to visualize the data. I realized about halfway through that my lead wasn’t sure about the parameters of the analysis, and I mentioned to him that the director had asked for more information than what he was having me do. He tells me he will speak with director.
So, our director is never there, so I give my lead about a week to speak with her, in the mean time I finish the project to the specifications that the director gave. I even included notes about information that I would need to make more accurate predictions, to draw conclusions, etc. It was really well documented.
Finally, exasperated, and with the project finished but just sitting on my computer for a week, I approached my director on a Saturday when I was working overtime. She confirmed that I needed to what she said in the project specs (duh), and also mentioned she needed a bigger data set than what I was working with if we had one. She told me to speak to my lead on Monday about this, but said that my work looked great.
Monday came and my lead wasn’t there so I spoke with my supervisor and she said that what I was using was the entire dataset, and that my work looked great and I could just send it off. So, at this point 2/3 of my bosses have seen the project, reviewed it, told me it was great, and confirmed that I was doing the right thing.
I sent it off to the director to disseminate to the appropriate people. Again, she looked at it and said it was great.
A week later (today) one of the people that the project was sent to approaches me and tells me that i did a great job and thank you so much for blah blah blah. She then asks me if the dataset I used included blahblah, and I said no, that I used what was given to me but that I’d be happy to go in and fix it if given the necessary data.
She tells me, “yeah the director was under the impression that these numbers were all about blahblah, so I think there was some kind of misunderstanding.” And then implied that I would not be the one fixing the mistake.
I’m being taken off of the project for two reasons: 1. it took to long to get the project out in the first place,
2. It didn’t even answer the questions that they needed answered.
I fucking told them in the notes and ALL THROUGH THE VISUALIZATIONS that I needed additional data to compare these things I’m so fucking mad. I’m so mad.15 -
Story Time. Inspired by another rant.
Context: I'm In a coding camp years ago, it's the first day.
We're doing introductions (name, why you're here, etc). Always fun to do that....
The folks running the camp are excited to introduce a student who also at one point was a teacher for some sort of girl power coding organization. So this raises questions, why would someone who teaches be a student in this camp?? And even a bigger question is raised when this person introduces themselves for a long time, and as an aside puts down the girls she taught in this program they taught ... like who does that?
horribleLady does that ...
A few hours later horribleLady asks her 12th question of the day (we haven't even started talking about code). Before she asks her question actually says:
“I know, I’m going to be a problem.” -laugh-
🚨🚨🚨 ヽ ( ꒪д꒪ )ノ 🚨🚨🚨
Fast forward to group projects and she's this sort of emotional storm, tears, and a sort of angry shouting that isn't angry enough for some folks to say she's yelling at people ... but she is. Fortunately I'm not in the first group project with her, but because we're all working in the same room we all get to see the train-wreck unfold.
The moment she doesn't get something (all the time) everyone in her group has to STOP and figure out what they're going to do about it, then again STOP because she thinks someone is doing something different than what was planned. STOP STOP STOP STOP STOP.
In a way, everything had to go through her, she didn’t declare it that way, she didn't present herself as any sort of authority, she would just stop everyone the moment she thought anything was wrong, or she didn't understand it (all the time), and either inject herself or demand help from her team. Everyone around her had to be drawn into whatever problem she had. It was horrific to watch.
Private slack channels would light up like crazy with "OMG", "WTF", "I DON'T UNDERSTAND HER", "FUCK" and "SHE"S HOW OLD!?!?"
So finally it happens to me and guyWhoDoesPotConstantly (capable guy, nice dude, pretty sure he was high all the time).... we're teamed up to work with horribleLady. Thankfully for just one day. I accept this because I figure one day with her is enough penance to try to avoid any further contact later on.
My approach is straight stone face. I refuse to respond to her sulking, or sighing, or general emotional bait she throws out constantly. I saw other students unwittingly take her bait (they were trying to be helpful) only to have her crap all over them with her frustrations or whatever it is is going on.
Still we're teamed up with her her for the day so I'm going to be a good team member and I explain what guyWhoDoesPotConstantly and I are doing / trying.... and so forth. But she's just too upset that she's even assigned to work with us, and tells me I'm just not doing it right, and her explanations about how we're not doing it right makes less than 0 sense. I ask her to show me what she means but she won't type anything on her keyboard, she'd just talk about how she’s thinking conceptually in circles and sulk about it rather than listen. I don't respond to any of her shit and say "I'm going to try this." and guyWhoDoesPotConstantly and I just keep working.
She would later call the instructor over and complain to him for a while and say: "These guys just get it, they're not helping me, I want to be assigned to another group." She doesn't get her way so she just moves to another table in front of us.
After that day I figured it was a great time to ask .... to NEVER be assigned to anything with her because "If I told her what I thought it would just get a lot worse." I got my way ;)
Other students weren't so lucky. Tears, sulking, her special way of yelling at people that somehow never got her in trouble (she should have been kicked out of the program) just kept going on. She refused to even present one group project she deemed not good enough despite the fact that she contributed nothing functional to the project that the TA's didn't write for her...
Amidst the stories she would tell to students was one of how she sued her totally sexist/racist/evil former employer. She never said what came of it, but that combined with her inability to do things reminded me of a rant I read on here.
I sometimes fear being hired someplace and walking in my first day to find I'm assigned to work with .... horribleLady. In this scenario she managed to get hired and they're too afraid to fire her so they assign the new guy to work with horribleLady...
I've no idea what happened to her after the camp.
(I rewrote this rant a few times because it kept circling back to a larger story about the coding camp I wrote about a few years ago, so if this seemed sort of broken up and wonky, yeah it was / is / yeah)4 -
Things happened this year so far in chronological order:
Applied to PhD and got all rejected
Graduated without a job because I thought the last event wouldn’t happen
Decided to take more shots at universities in Europe and Canada
Paper got published and got best paper honorable mention
Interviewed by couple professors and the one in Canada seems to be interested in me
School in Canada, which rejected me before, reopened my case for review
Bank account got closed because my parents transferred me some money to support my unemployment ass and bank thought it was a fraud
The review process took so long I got hopeless and thought, if I end up writing webpages for other people, why not doing it now? And did two webpages which are in my previous rant, pretty good and highly recommended imo
Canada school promised a date but didn’t follow that date, depression attack
Finally sent them an email and got an answer saying the admission approved my application and they are working on paper work. But I still don’t believe it because I’m paranoid
Got an email from a professor today confirming they are doing paper work and I should receive official paper soon.
You can see the dramatic ups and downs, but in the end, guess I’m going to Toronto for phd12 -
The website for our biggest client went down and the server went haywire. Though for this client we don’t provide any infrastructure, so we called their it partner to start figuring this out.
They started blaming us, asking is if we had upgraded the website or changed any PHP settings, which all were a firm no from us. So they told us they had competent people working on the matter.
TL;DR their people isn’t competent and I ended up fixing the issue.
Hours go by, nothing happens, client calls us and we call the it partner, nothing, they don’t understand anything. Told us they can’t find any logs etc.
So we setup a conference call with our CXO, me, another dev and a few people from the it partner.
At this point I’m just asking them if they’ve looked at this and this, no good answer, I fetch a long ethernet cable from my desk, pull it to the CXO’s office and hook up my laptop to start looking into things myself.
IT partner still can’t find anything wrong. I tail the httpd error log and see thousands upon thousands of warning messages about mysql being loaded twice, but that’s not the issue here.
Check top and see there’s 257 instances of httpd, whereas 256 is spawned by httpd, mysql is using 600% cpu and whenever I try to connect to mysql through cli it throws me a too many connections error.
I heard the IT partner talking about a ddos attack, so I asked them to pull it off the public network and only give us access through our vpn. They do that, reboot server, same problems.
Finally we get the it partner to rollback the vm to earlier last night. Everything works great, 30 min later, it crashes again. At this point I’m getting tired and frustrated, this isn’t my job, I thought they had competent people working on this.
I noticed that the db had a few corrupted tables, and ask the it partner to get a dba to look at it. No prevail.
5’o’clock is here, we decide to give the vm rollback another try, but first we go home, get some dinner and resume at 6pm. I had told them I wanted to be in on this call, and said let me try this time.
They spend ages doing the rollback, and then for some reason they have to reconfigure the network and shit. Once it booted, I told their tech to stop mysqld and httpd immediately and prevent it from start at boot.
I can now look at the logs that is leading to this issue. I noticed our debug flag was on and had generated a 30gb log file. Tail it and see it’s what I’d expect, warmings and warnings, And all other logs for mysql and apache is huge, so the drive is full. Just gotta delete it.
I quietly start apache and mysql, see the website is working fine, shut it down and just take a copy of the var/lib/mysql directory and etc directory just go have backups.
Starting to connect a few dots, but I wasn’t exactly sure if it was right. Had the full drive caused mysql to corrupt itself? Only one way to find out. Start apache and mysql back up, and just wait and see. Meanwhile I fixed that mysql being loaded twice. Some genius had put load mysql.so at the top and bottom of php ini.
While waiting on the server to crash again, I’m talking to the it support guy, who told me they haven’t updated anything on the server except security patches now and then, and they didn’t have anyone familiar with this setup. No shit, it’s running php 5.3 -.-
Website up and running 1.5 later, mission accomplished.6 -
Recap: https://www.devrant.io/rants/878300
I was out Thursday at the Hospital. I'm what the doctors would call "Ill as fuck"
So, Friday I’m back in the office to the usual: "How was that appointment?"
I know people mean well when they ask this. So, I do the polite thing and tell them it went as well as it could.
Realistically it does't matter how well it went... They haven't cured Crohn's because I showed up to the appointment. They know I'm fucked already.
But, push it down, add it to the future aneurism.
I had to go through the usual resignation meetings with managers:
"We"re fucked now you're going"
"yep"
"we need to get a handle on how fucked"
"already done that for you, here"s a trello board, very fucked."
"we need to put a plan together to drop all the junior devs in the shit with the work you’ve been doing"
"You need about 4 devs, please refer to the previous trello board for your plan"
Meanwhile, me and Morpheus are in constant communication because all of this is like a Shakespearean comedy.
So, I overhear a conversation between a Junior Dev and the Solution Architect.
[SA] took over the project because he knows better than two tried and tested senior devs -_- (fuckwit).
JD: "It took me one and a half days to build it out"
SA: "Yeah, it must have taken me twice as long... It must be a problem with the project, you should just be able to check it out and run it."
JD: "I know, it has to be wrong"
All of this is about Morpheus' work of art, of an Ionic 3 hybrid app.
I fumed quietly at my desk because I've been ordered by the Stazi to be hands off.
Since Morpheus and me were pulled from the project [JD] and [JD2] were dropped into it to get it over the line.
It"s unfortunate and I was clear and honest with my advice to them: I personally would not take over the project because I"d be way out of my depth... Oh, and the App works, so uh, there's no work to do.
They have been constantly at our desks. Asking fuckdiculous questions about how to perform basic tasks. So they can get Morpheus" frigging masterpiece to the user.
It"s like watching that touch up of jesus that got borked by an amateur. Shit I have google, it's like watching this happen: http://ti.me/NnNSAb
[JD] came to me Friday evening.
"I can’t get this to build to iOS or install on [Test Analyst]'s phone."
Me: "No worries brother, where are you stuck right now?"
[JD] describes the first steps with clear indication he hasn't googled his problem.
Life lesson: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=lmgtfy
Que an hour of me showing [JD] how to build an Ion3 project for iOS. Fuck it, your man's in a bind and he"s asked politely for help. I can show him quicker than he can read 3 sets of docos.
I took him through 'ionic cordova build ios', the archive and release processes in XCode 9, then the apk bundling process for droid. Finally we have an MAM so the upload process for that too.
All the while cleaning up his AppIDs, Profiles, deployment attempts.
Damn they were a mess.
I did this with a smile on my face, not because I could say "I told you so"... But. because when any developer asks you how to do something. If you know how to do it, you should always be happy to learn them some new tricks!
Dude's alright, he's been dropped in the shit. Now I know how badly so I'll help him learn things that are useful to his role, but aren't project specific.
As a plausi-senior dev (I'll tell you about that later); it's my job to make sure my team have what they need to go home smiling!
I’m not a hateful fucker, the guy asked me an honest question so I am happy to give him the honest answer.
I took him through it a few times and explained a few best practices. Most were how to do his AppID and ProvProfile set up. Good lad, took it all on board.
However! In his frustration, he pointed the finger at Morpheus' "David" (ref: Michelangelo).
He miraculously morphed into a shiny colourful parrot and fed me SA's line:
"you should just be able to build from a clean clone"
My response was calm and clear:
"You can, it took me 20 minutes on Thursday evening. I was bored and curios, so I wanted to validate Morpheus' work. Here it is on my iOS device and my Android device. It would have taken me 5 if my laptop wasn’t so horrifically out of date."
I validated Morpheus' work so I have evidence, I trust that brilliant bastard.
I just need to be able to prove it's good.
[JD] took this on board.
Maybe listening to two tried and trusted senior devs is better than listening to a headstrong Solution Architect.
When JD left for the weekend I was working a late one (https://www.devrant.io/rants/874765).
His sign off was beautiful.
"I think I can happily admit defeat on this one, it can wait until Monday."
To which I replied: "no worries brother, if you need a hand give me a shout."
Rule 1: Don't be a cunt.
Rule 2: If someone needs help and you can give it: Give it!
Rule 3: Don't interrupt James' cigarette time.
Rule 4: goto Rule 3.rant day 3 jct resigns crohns resignation solution architect wk71 invisible illness fuckwit illness junior developer4 -
People/companies talking about ooh we want gender diversity we want more female software developers, IT professionals etc
You talk the talk, do you know how to walk the walk?? Do you know how to deal with female engineers?
I am a hardcore engineer worked and studied majorly with men for years. I lead, managed teams had my own company worked as a consultant for years.
Then I got into the IT industry as developer later. I was completely against the idea of being female would make any difference or you would be treated differently.
Finally I had my own enlightenment and stopped resisting that idea.
Some treatments made me think what are these guys doing? Don’t treat me like your sister. I am not your sister. Don’t see the femininity or looks. I am not a Merrilyn Monroe to say oooh you are great you know soo much. I am not paid for that act, I do my job! It’s same as yours mate.
Don’t underestimate me or try to preach me as if I am a cute little girl. Don’t show off and boost your ego next to other guys.
Now I regretfully I agree the ladies ranting about male dominance and getting different treatment in IT.
I am literally trying to avoid red nail polishes or red lipstick god forbid. Maybe I should put some fake beard and a belly, loose jeans with an energy drink in hand. Here comes the expert IT professional, already ticking a box.
Honestly you are not taken seriously most of the time. If you are a guy then they are all ears..And those guys talk about they want gender diversity blah blah
You feel like a ghost when you express your opinion. You are not taken into account even when you have a comment or suggestion.
Even humiliated by a guy giving me a speech about how to be a good developer next to a manager. Look buddy I am not a yesterday’s child. I am at your age. I haven’t come to this position by jumping around picking flowers in a field. If I was a man, would you dare saying those to me? There could be a street fight coming.
LinkedIn selfie takers with body show offs putting ooh I am an IT recruiter as a female I got into IT. You can do it too. (don’t get me wrong I respect that achievement that’s good) but those girls get thousands of likes and applauses, you are working in IT for years people say they are seeking for. Your technical post doesn’t even get 20 likes. Your encouraging comment on a guy’s post isn’t even acknowledged. You are not even taken into account. Am I a ghost or something?
Honestly I don’t understand.
What do you mean by gender diversity? What do you want here?
Leave this gender bullshit. Look at the knowledge you don’t even know what equality means. It’s not having even numbers of genders. It is respecting knowledge and hard work regardless. Listening and acknowledging without judgement. Looking beyond male, female or others
Companies that say we want to have more females, you don’t come and knock on my door either. You are already stating a difference there. Attract with indifference don’t come and tell me you are a female we want more females here.
I’m telling you this sector is not getting proper gender equality for 25 years. Talk is there but mentality is not yet there.
I am super pissed off and discouraged today. I don’t even get discouraged that easily. Now I understand some women in IT talking about insecurities. I am on the edge of having one, such a shame.
Don’t come at me now I would bite!
This is my generalisation yes. Exceptions apply and how good it would have been if those exceptions were dominant.33 -
How did you break through your own barriers to finally learn programming?
My SO is constantly complaining that we don’t have enough money. I make a decent amount as a full-time dev at a large company, but we live in an expensive city and are currently going through a time of few funds.
He started driving delivery food orders, he likes it okay, but it pays very little. He still complains about money.
I want him to learn JavaScript.
He was once asked to make a website for a company he’s involved in. He only used SquareSpace, but he was never satisfied with their stock code. He went digging for JavaScript snippets he could use, and he made one of the most beautiful and responsive websites I’ve seen.
Since then, I’ve been encouraging him to learn JavaScript. I’m trying to convince him it will be a great source of additional income, he can make his own schedule while doing contract work, and he can ask me anything he wants while he’s learning. How many beginners have someone they can ask anything of, at any time?
He doesn’t want to learn. He doesn’t think he is capable. I remember this feeling before I learned to code. A chunk of someone else’s JS does look genuinely terrifying if you don’t know what it means. I want him to give it one honest try before he decides it’s “not for him,” but he isn’t open to it enough to try.
What can I do to help him understand he is capable? He’s in his mid-30s and insists he’s too old to catch up. He’s smart, detail-oriented, and I know he would write code that’s a million times cleaner than mine. He absolutely has a programmer inside of him, and I want to encourage him to simply try.
Is there something I can to do introduce JS in a non-threatening way? Or should I just accept his refusal and let it go? Thanks for any advice.18 -
Well, it finally happened.
After 25 years coding in all types of languages and environments, I’m no longer having fun.
It now seems like it’s a fight to get interested in the code. I used to be something that I would spend hours / days doing. Now I just want to walk away from the code.
Is it true (do you think) that after a while all you see is a for loop, an if statement, a null check and you just think to yourself. Fuck this! Because I think I’m there.
God it’s depressing to think that I no longer find it fun.4 -
A little over a year into my job at my current company back in January, I have a yearly meeting with my manager to discuss the progress I’ve made and to talk about what’s next. This is the meeting where we are supposed to discuss a potential pay raise but it’s the last topic of a predefined agenda.
So we spend a couple hours talking about how work has been for me. I started there as a junior developer with very little experience in the field but was quickly able to jump into a project with a fairly large codebase to help out the only other developer working on the project. Before long they’re so happy with me that they actually put me in charge of the application, which means my responsibilities evolve toward a whole lot more communication with the client and everything else that comes along with being in charge, including a lot of stress. I also salvaged another application initially developed by another company but that was so bugged it should’ve just been sent to the pits and rewritten from scratch. I was also asked to develop a couple POCs that were satisfactorily delivered.
Anyway, after almost two hours of going over my accomplishments and getting praises from my manager, we finally get to the part where we’re supposed to discuss a pay raise. He immediately cuts me off by saying the subject is not on the table due to the current crisis and our company struggling to make ends meet. I tell him I understand how hard it must be for them but also explain that I know for a fact other companies in the field are still making financial efforts to reward employees they’re happy with. He responds by saying that he’s aware of that, but he also “knows” that those same companies are laying off people that don’t deserve to be laid off despite the fact that they’re receiving government aid to stay afloat.
In the weeks following that meeting, I find out our company is doing the exact same thing my manager was condemning (laying off good people, taking massive advantage of government aid) and all the while not giving anybody a raise.
In any case, I really felt like that meeting was huge waste of time. What’s the point of going over everything I’ve done, congratulating me for my great work and even promising to give me even more responsibility if you don’t want to reward me for any of it? Do you honestly think I’m working hard so I can get a pat on the back or brownie points from you? I’ve got a family to take care of and I am trying to make their lives a little better each day by putting in hard work. But if hard work and climbing the latter of responsibility does not help me achieve that, what’s the point??1 -
In only I were 1.15 times faster or had better planning (why didn’t I use the Saturday Sunday at the end of the first week 🤦🏼♂️), things would’ve happened differently. I think I’m becoming stupid and my tolerance levels are going down too.
So this happened a while back ..
I was given a code base which didn’t have any changes in the last two years and I was asked to add a feature to this. This was my first task in this new group I was part of. I had two weeks to do this starting on a Monday.
Partway through implementation I realised that the code base is a pile of shit and I wasn’t doing myself or anyone else any favours by shitting on it.
It’s Wednesday. I’ve dealt with many other codebases before but the urge to rewrite this particular one was just unlike anything else. And so I started changing code and before I realised, I modified almost all the important files.
I got sick of this mixed up code and started a rewrite from scratch. It was Friday and I finally had just the basic mechanics of the whole thing working. Now I needed to add all the functionalities and also my new feature.
It should be noted that at no point did I tell any of the superiors I was doing this fearing what they might say and also fearing going back to adding shit to shit.
By the end of the second week, the rewrite was complete and I only had the new feature to add. The rewrite was significantly smaller, compartmentalised and well commented because I did the bloody commenting (where it was not obvious from the code). So on Friday, I was asked about the progress and I told them that it needed some more work and that I need a couple more days. And I got shit for it. I was told it was a mistake giving this task to me and that I am not competent enough. One of the superiors told the other superior about perhaps giving me something more suited to my level. To be fair to them, they were expecting the work in the two weeks to be for the new feature.
And in two days’ time, on Monday (I worked on Saturday and half of Sunday), I finished the whole thing and gave it to them. New feature was working. And I still did not tell them what I did. The tool worked fine so they had no idea what happened because this project had no version control and I pointed them to a new directory with the new code with a first commit.3 -
!Rant
Awesomeness ensues!!!!!
I finally quit my day job at the place I was working to finally go full time with my business, TerraNimbus. I was able to secure a small loan to cover business and personal expenses until I can drum up enough business to keep things a float.
I’m super fucking stoked because I’ve been wanting to branch out and do this for about 4 years now and finally feel like I have the right pieces in play to make it work. I’m as nervous as hell but so fucking excited too!
I just needed to share this here cause the DevRant community is world class and you guys/gals are fucking killing it everyday being AWESOME!!! And you all feel like extended family members to me all going through the motions in each of your lives and keeping ‘in touch’ through devRant on a daily basis. So I wanted to share my story with everyone here.4 -
After the 4th time of being reminded to log all possible hours, including those for which I’m mostly researching and not producing code or deliverables, I’m finally just doing it. I hate billing for low impact activities. A) Because I’m slow at everything and B) If I were the client I’d be pissed that I got charged 2 hours for what amounted to 10 minutes of actual coding and launching the feature.3
-
I’m back on this platform after an awesome year of progress in my dev career. Here is the back story:
1. I was a junior dev at a financial technologies company for a little over a year.
2. The company was looking to hire an Integration Manager for its software with both our vendors and customers.
3. The pay was good and I was offered that position as a promotion.
4. I accepted it and said to myself that this is temporary. It will help me pay the bills and secure a better life, which it did.
5. Lost two years of my dev career in that position doing nothing but basic integrations (rest apis, web and mobile sdks, and work arounds for what does not work). Zero challenge. This is when I started to use devRant often.
6. On the bright side, the bills were paid and life style got better.
7. Two years in, any way out of the integration department is something I am willing to accept. So I approached every one and worked extra hard as an Application Support Engineer for every product in the firm for free, in the hopes of making good connections and eventually be snatched by someone. This lasted six months.
8. Finally! Got an offer to become the Product Manager for one of the apllications that I supported.
9. Accepted the offer, left the department, and started working with the new team in an Agile fashion. This is when I stopped using devRant because the time was full of work.
10. Five months in, I was leading a team of developers to deliver features and provide the solutions we market. That was an awesome experience and every thing could not have been better.
Except…
Every developer was far better than me, which made me realize that I need to go back on that track, build solutions myself, and become a knowledgable engineer before moving into leading positions.
11. After about a 100 job applications online, I’m back as a Junior developer in another company building both Web and Voice Applications. Very, very happy.
Finally, lessons learned:
1. The path that pays more now is not necessarily the one you wanna take. Plan ahead.
2. There is always a way out. Working for free can get you connections, which can then make you money.
3. Become a knowledgable and experienced engineer before leading other engineers. The difference will show.
4. Love what you do and have fun doing it.
Two cents.1 -
Did I suffer through 2023? Hell yes! Fuck 2023! A LOT of doubt, anxiety, thinking that I live wrong somehow.
Yet, I’m completely satisfied with the results of 2023, with what I was able to accomplish. It means I do, in fact, live my life right. If I carry on doing what I do, I’ll be getting what I get. Here’s what happened to me in 2023:
- Cat!
- No more sugar
- No more smoking
- First time reading paper books in 15 years
- Made me a new website (miloi.am/engine) that, for the first time in my life, isn’t about me as a job candidate, but about me as a person.
- SENT MY DEVRANT LINK to my CEO! Dreaded this coming out for YEARS. Finally did it. He read my posts, told me I’m free to be who I am, told me he already knows me well, that he wasn’t surprised, and overall didn’t care much.
- New name, new pronouns
- Learned how to cook: soups, pancakes, falafel, other popular dishes. Most importantly, now when I go through the store, I’m not afraid of thinking about cooking. I look at something, and I know how to cook it, more or less.
- Found a good psychiatrist, got properly diagnosed, got properly prescribed
- Made a FIRE architecture at my work
- Conceived (and partly implemented) four monetizable side projects (that I can’t monetize yet because of my passport situation)
- Several VERY important insights that completely changed who I am. Several super crucial self-therapy skills.
Let’s see what happens in 2024 😛4 -
Finally got my first dev job. I am looking at the code base for my company. And it’s like I know how to code in this language. But I don’t know half of the advanced shit they’re doing. I understand they have more experience than me. But I’m just not sure how to catch up to them. Or be even on the same level as them? I guess just more out of office learning?
I can read what they’re putting in the code and understand how it works. But like how they came up with it I have no clue. I guess I’ll learn over time and have to put in some extra man hours.5 -
Making a hard switch to ubuntu on my desktop at home. Getting just a teeny tiny, tad, bit: absolutely fucking livid....
Trying to learn ansible, vagrant, and docker more in depth for both work and my personal projects. All that I’ve been doing is just spinning my wheels trying to figure out the stupid fuck-mothering quirks with running this shit on Windows. Yes you absolutely can use all of these tools on a Windows box. There’s plenty of ports, patches, and workarounds. But I have spent all day trying to build a few vagrant boxes and use ansible to set them up. Simple LAMP stack boxes on CentOS7. Nothing major... unfortunately I spent like 90-110 minutes trying to figure out why virtualbox wouldn’t run properly. Dumbass me forgot that I installed Hyper-V ages ago.
O...K.... whelp... hyperv provider it is...
Luckily it only took about 15 minutes to determine that Hyperv’s networking can’t be setup from vagrant because vagrant doesn’t know how to interact with the hyperv - vswitch. So networking config is ignored and all VMs run on default switch (NAT) which is annoying but workable.
Ran into other issues trying to stay SSH’ed into the VM. PowerShell core (6) ssh’es into the box perfectly fine, but every time I opened vi to edit configs my terminal color scheme and fonts got fucked harder than a 2 dollar hooker on nickel night.
I’m a bright-green text on black background kinda guy. However the terminal kept changing to bright-red text on white background! It was like getting skull-fucked by a minotaur.
After a while I said fuck it, let’s try putty. Vagrant was using it’s own ssh keypair for the boxes, at work on my mac. Works like a dream. Putty failed me hard and shit the bed, kept getting all kinds of keypair errors. At this point I was finished spent too long trying to make shit work correctly on this jankbox. With enough time and patience I probably could’ve figured all of these problems out. I’m certain that at least 70% of them were caused by user error. I’m known by many as the walking ID-10t.
But alas, I have no time left in the day to fuck around with shit that doesn’t work immediately for morons like myself. My only hang up for the longest time with a complete switch to Linux was gaming. But with Proton and WINE I’m comfortable with giving it the ol’ college try. (Shhhh, don’t remind me I dropped out of college...
...Thrice.)
The gamble here is that I’ll give more than 2 halves of a fuck about trying to get my games working. A Study environment and materials for certs and general training won’t be getting anywhere near my full attention.
So, at long last, I hope this attempt at a full *nix switch finally sticks!!!
👾2 -
I’m too dumb to learn frontend frameworks.
I’m a backend developer, not the greatest but I get the work done. I can understand different programming languages even if I don’t write in them, you just understand basic principles and know what’s going on.
I can do some work in HTML, CSS and some JS.
But what the hell is with those popular frontend frameworks. I thought I pretty much understand how it works, so started doing some crap on my own, some pretty responsive navbar with dropdowns to start. Nevermind a million of npm packages to just start working and some weird errors in website source (“JavaScript is not enabled”, I spent few hours trying to fix it, but it’s just there, everything is working fine even with this message there). I have pretty navbar, nice, time to add dropdown.
Nope, not working. Maybe classic css solution?
Nope.
Ok, time to Google. What do I find? A million of npm dependencies that provide dropdowns, for some you need to pay, wtf.
But I want to write one on my own.
Found few tutorials that wasn’t even remotely helpful, it’s like with the online recipes, “when I was growing up on the farm…” and then something that it’s not working.
Finally found some nice looking tutorial, was following that and then.. it ended. It was maybe half of the solution, dude forgot about some components and just left.
I quit, I’m going back to writing jsp, my brain is too smooth for frontend frameworks2 -
I was given a project to fix and improve a legacy unity VR project I was told was for the oculus rift Now the problems started almost immediately partly stemming from the fact I’ve never used unity before this project was handed to me as my long term TA assignment
And partly from the fact there was no oculus integration in the game at all. it was built for GoogleVr and most of the code the last person wrote consisted of massive sections (25-50 lines) of commented out code and no explanation of what the hell the non-commented parts are supposed to be doing
So long story short. I’m now in a basic unity course, six feet deep in documentation trying to read resources that go way over my head in understanding, and am rebuilding the project from basically scratch (took the assets and saved the c# scripts for reference) and have finally figured out how to at least get the player character constantly moving forward and stream in the WRLD3D environment like the last guy did. Now to get the player character to turn and change direction when the player turns their head with the oculus headset
By the way. WRLD3D is a really cool api thing in my opinion